Burn Him Alive

continued  When discussing Westerfield's future, Jeffrey Dahmer's name comes up again. "But he's not going to make it in [prison]," Jeff continues. "They'll keep him in protective custody, no doubt, but look at what happened to Jeffrey Dahmer. Believe it or not, the 'seals' -- the prison guards -- are the ones that set him up. They sat there and watched the guy do it. If he'd been where I was at, nothin' would have happened. I would have stayed the hell away from the guy, because I don't need anymore trouble. There were 50 guys in there, and not one of them was happy with the case."

Even though he is homeless, Robert Swayze Dalton is glad to get out of jail. At 49, Dalton speaks articulately with an urbane East Coast accent (he later confesses that he was an English major in college). "I was drinking a beer in public, and they had caught me doing that several times. I have to drink it outside -- I don't have a home!" (he laughs) "None of the people I was with watched the trial on TV. We're more interested in music and sports. We get the Union-Tribune delivered to us, so we got all of our information from that. If he goes in for life, it's not going to be long before he's dead, because somebody will get him. It's going to be a long, miserable wait for him to go. He'll be racking his brain, he'll be pulling his hair out: he'll always be looking over his shoulder. I think the death penalty in his case is more humane. The prisoners all thought he was guilty, and so do I. I follow the newspaper every single day. That's my only source of information, really. I've read every article on him. I don't think I missed a day, and I believe the evidence. I think he had a dual personality. In other words, why was he caught with all that pornographic child material on his home computer? You can be one person in public and another person in private. I think that was his release -- his way of letting his hair down, which is why he didn't have so much of it!" (more laughter)

"He's going to go through an awful lot of appeals, because, from what his lawyers have said, there are an awful lot of loopholes that have to be pursued. So it's going to be years and years and years before the death penalty comes through. Probably a decade. If he does appeal, and he does get in the general population, that's the death penalty anyway. If he'd been in my cell, he would probably have just been ostracized, because we were just misdemeanors. We wouldn't do anything because we don't want any more time."

Kent Kline has only been in jail for 24 hours but has no shortage of opinions on David Westerfield. "No one said they watched the coverage in jail, but we were just talkin' about how it's unfair for him to get protective custody. He's not going to suffer any punishment. He's going to sit on death row for 20 years and then he might get killed. The people he's going to run into in the yard are other motherfuckers like him, other Westerfield motherfuckers, other punks, other people who are pussy. Chester the Molesters, you know what I'm sayin'? If they really wanted to make him suffer, they'd throw his ass in GP with the pimps, the players, the hustlers, the pushers, the gangsters, and rapists, and they would whoop his ass. That's punishment. That's called jail. But in protective custody, he ain't gonna have no problem. He's gonna get to chill, and they're going to kill him real quick."

When the question of Westerfield's guilt comes up, Kline posits yet another prisoner's theory. "People think he's guilty, but some people think the girl's mom had something to do with it. I asked one guy, why would this lady want to get her daughter killed for no reason, and he said, 'Why do people do stupid shit?' " Kline has no theories about why Westerfield killed Danielle van Dam. "They'll probably just throw his ass in San Quentin or whatever, let him sit around for 20 years, maybe more. He'll be chillin', won't have nothin' to worry about -- PC'd out. He won't suffer shit. It's not hard, it's easy. If he'd been in with us, he'd probably have got picked on or fucked with or, you know. That's jail."